Friday, July 27, 2012

This is a major breakthrough in rendering: the last version of Octane Render can now render complex animatable objects completely in real-time with path tracing. This has never been done before and is a game changer for animation previsualisation.

Real-time ray tracing of scenes with highly detailed dynamic objects has always been considered as a near impossible feat and has held ray tracing back as a rendering method for interactive applications such as games. Until now: we have adapted Octane in such a way that it can handle dynamic scenes effortlessly and in real-time without compromising the ultrafast GPU path tracing performance.

The following video was made with the Octane plug-in for 3ds Max and demonstrates that the acceleration structure of the animated robot can be updated instantly while rendering an instant preview of the lighting. The transformer in the animation was used before in a demo that I've made with Brigade some time ago (http://raytracey.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/real-time-photorealistic-path-tracing.html) and I always wanted to see it animated and rendered in real-time with path tracing, which can now be done with Octane and will be shown in another video :

Aila and Laine (Nvidia research) are both geniuses when it comes to GPU path tracing, image reconstruction, SVO and GI in general and their papers are guaranteed to contain exciting (and reproducible) results. The paper includes some interesting comparisons between the new algorithm, the a-trous wavelet filter and random parameter filtering. Good stuff!

The recently released plug-ins for Max and Maya combined with some recent breakthroughs on the workflow front will allow for some extremely cool and unseen stuff. Can't wait to get my hands dirty on it.

About Me

Passionate about real-time path tracing and photoreal rendering with GPU ray tracing. I'm currently leading the scientific visualisation team at the EPFL Blue Brain Project in Geneva. Before that, co-founder and project lead at MI New Zealand, project lead at the University of Auckland NZ, technical project manager on OctaneRender (from pre-v1.0 beta to v2.0), instigator and driving force behind the Brigade real-time path tracing in games project leading the creative and technical R&D vision (Feb 2012 - Oct 2013), photoreal 3D graphics developer and consultant, medical imaging/neuroradiology researcher. My tutorial series on GPU accelerated path tracing (with source code) can be found on GitHub.
For questions, email me at sam.lapere@live.be